The original National Library building on Kings Avenue, Canberra, was designed by Edward Henderson. Originally intended to be several wings, only one wing was completed and was demolished in 1968. Now the site of the Edmund Barton Building.

The National Library of Australia is the largest reference library of Australia, responsible under the terms of the National Library Act for "maintaining and developing a national collection of library material, including a comprehensive collection of library material relating to Australia and the Australian people." In 2012–2013, the National Library collection comprised 6,496,772 items, and an additional 15,506 metres of manuscript material.[1]

Contents

History1

Collections2

Australian & General Collection2.1

Asian Collections2.2

Pictures and manuscripts2.3

Reading rooms3

Services4

Trove4.1

Directors5

See also6

References7

External links8

History

The National Library of Australia, while formally established by the passage of the National Library Act 1960, had been functioning as a National Library rather than strictly a Parliamentary Library, almost since its inception.

In 1901, a Commonwealth Parliamentary Library was established to serve the newly formed Federal Parliament of Australia. From its inception the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library was driven to development of a truly national collection. In 1907 the Joint Parliamentary Library Committee under the Chairmanship of the Speaker, Sir Frederick Holder defined the objective of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library in the following words:

The Library Committee is keeping before it the ideal of building up, for the time when Parliament shall be established in the Federal Capital, a great Public Library on the lines of the world-famed Library of Congress at Washington; such a library, indeed, as shall be worthy of the Australian Nation; the home of the literature, not of a State, or of a period, but of the world, and of all time.[2]

The present library building was opened in 1968. The building was designed by the architectural firm of Bunning and Madden. The foyer is decorated in marble, with stained-glass windows by Leonard French and three tapestries by Mathieu Matégot.[3]

Collections

In 2012–2013 the Library collection comprised 6,496,772 items, with an estimated additional 2,325,900 items held in the manuscripts collection.[1] The Library's collections of Australiana have developed into the nation's single most important resource of materials recording the Australian cultural heritage. Australian writers, editors and illustrators are actively sought and well represented—whether published in Australia or overseas.

The Library’s collection includes all formats of material, from books, journals, websites and manuscripts to pictures, photographs, maps, music, oral history recordings, manuscript papers and ephemera.[4]

Approximately 92.1% of the Library's collection has been catalogued[1] and is discoverable through the online catalogue.[5]

The Library has digitized over 174,000 items from its collection[6] (the 100,000th being http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-vn3409117 and, where possible, delivers these directly across the Internet. The Library is a world leader in digital preservation techniques,[7] and maintains an Internet-accessible archive of selected Australian websites called the Pandora Archive.

Australian & General Collection

The Library collects material produced by Australians, for Australians or about the Australian experience in all formats—not just printed works—books, serials, newspapers, maps, posters, music and printed ephemera—but also online publications and unpublished material such as manuscripts, pictures and oral histories. The Library has particular collection strengths in the performing arts, including dance.

The Library's considerable collections of general overseas and rare book materials, as well as world-class Asian and Pacific collections which augment the Australiana collections. The print collections are further supported by extensive microform holdings.

The Asian Collections are searchable via the National Library's catalogue.[12]

Pictures and manuscripts

Discussion of the acquisition and preservation process of Joan Blaeu's Archipelagus Orientalis (1663) by the National Library (2013)

The National Library holds an extensive collection of pictures and manuscripts. The manuscript collection contains about 26 million separate items, covering in excess of 10,492 meters of shelf space (ACA Australian Archival Statistics, 1998). The collection relates predominantly to Australia, but there are also important holdings relating to Papua New Guinea, New Zealand and the Pacific. The collection also holds a number of European and Asian manuscript collections or single items have been received as part of formed book collections.

The National Library’s Pictures collection focuses on Australian people, places and events, from European exploration of the South Pacific to contemporary events. Art works and photographs are acquired primarily for their informational value, and for their importance as historical documents.[16]

Reading rooms

The large National Library building is home to various reading rooms and collections. On the ground floor is the Main Reading Room—this is where the bulk of the Library's Internet access terminals are located, and where wireless internet access is available. Services are also delivered on-site from the Petherick Reading Room (for advanced readers) on the ground floor; the Newspaper & Microforms and Map Reading Rooms on the lower-ground floor, Manuscripts and Pictures on level 2, and Asian Collections on level 3. Limited space is also available for readers at the Hume Annexe.

Services

The National Library of Australia provides a national leadership role in developing and managing collaborative online services with the Australian library community, making it easier for users to find and access information resources at the national level.

Australian National Bibliographic Database[18] (ANBD) and offers free access through the Libraries Australia[19] subscription based service which is also operated by the NLA. It is used for reference, collection development, cataloguing and interlibrary lending.

PANDORA, Australia's Web Archive. A collection of Australian online publications, established initially by the National Library of Australia in 1996, and now built in collaboration with nine other Australian libraries and cultural collecting organisations.

Trove, online library database aggregator

Trove

The Trove logo

'Trove is an online library database aggregator, a centralised national service built with the collaboration of major libraries of Australia.[21] Trove's most well known feature is the digitised collection of Australian newspapers. By June 2013 over 10 million digitised pages, or 100 million articles were accessible through Trove.[22] Many of the NLA's resource discovery services have been fully integrated with Trove—meaning that several (such as "music Australia", "pictures Australia" and "Australian newspapers") are now accessible only through the site. Others (such as PANDORA and the ANBD) use Trove as their primary means of public access. The service is able locate resources about Australia and Australians, which reaches many locations otherwise unavailable to external search engines.[23]

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